Share

Snøhetta, like pretty much all architecture firms, designs buildings for humans. The Oslo and New York-based company is probably best known for the sweeping Oslo Opera House and the newly opened National September 11 Memorial Museum Pavilion, both of which are lauded for encouraging people to interact with public buildings in different ways. Earlier this summer, however, the architecture firm built two new buildings for some way smaller inhabitants: honeybees.

The Vulkan Beehives are on the roof of Mathellen Oslo, a food court in the city’s Grünerløkka district. The DIY design ethos is strong in Grünerløkka. The neighborhood's development since 2009 has mirrored Brooklyn’s, where the once-industrial factories and old lots are being flipped into urban greenhouses, craft breweries, and farm-to-table restaurants. “It feels quite fresh; people are taking a lot of initiative,” says Snøhetta architect Peter Grigis, who lead the Vulkan project. One of those people is Alexander Du Rietz, a local beekeeper who proposed building hives for 160,000 bees next to the food court’s rooftop garden.

Bikuber pÃ¥ taket av Mathallen pÃ¥ Vulkan i Oslo

Morten Brakestad

Typical man-made beehives aren’t exactly objects of beauty, since they’re really just designed for gathering honey efficiently. Most commercial hives are metal, wooden, or foam boxes with removable frames inside that give the bees structure for forming their honey and honeycombs. Because the Vulkan Beehives decorate the roof of a dining destination, they needed to be more ornamental than that. “We wanted to make it like a piece of outdoor furniture,” Grigis says. His team drafted up three versions of the hive and let Du Rietz pick the design.

The final hive works a bit like a casing, or a shell, for what Grigis calls, “generic foam beehives” that Du Rietz installed inside. Relocating thousands of bees—whose jobs are all about navigation, since they go out, collect pollen, and then return—can be disorienting, so Grigis designed the exterior of the beehives to be as organic and familiar as possible, by reflecting the honeycomb structures on the interior: the birch plywood is stained a honey-brown, and the laser-cut lattice is in a hexagonal pattern. A few modern concessions include a thermostat, a scale for measuring the honey production, and, on the exterior, a tiny landing strip for incoming bees making their way back indoors: “We extended it out because when the bees come in they’re tired, exhausted from collecting the pollen,” Grigis says. “So we created a landing pad.”